Stevie Wonder pleads for game accessibility during Spike Awards

Kes: I'm not finding much on this story beyond the short description such as that made to The Lost Gamer
http://www.thelostgamer.com/2009/12/13/stevie-wonder-pleads-for-disabled-accessiblity/
in which the author scratches his ehad and mentions that hey, no one really thought about that before, but I am a bit boggled that seemingly no one thought it at all ironic that Stevie Wonder was asked to bestow an award for a game to which he has no access.
Sometimes righteous indignation fails you and you have to go straight to helpless giggling.
Also, I love Stevie Wonder.

More drugs, sclera transplant a bust, and amazing tissue transplant wizardry

My third round of steroids and antibiotics ended this weekend and all of my post-op infection issues pretty much immediately returned, but now more noticeably because for ten days I felt better than I had for a couple of months. Nothing is working on the headache and I am also running a fever.

My surgeon called me back a little while ago and put me on the same Prednisone and antibiotics combo that I was most recently taking for the next couple of weeks, and then said what we pretty much already figured out, that the sclera transplant was probably being rejected and that the entire orbital sphere--which is where these issues originally started--would probably have to be removed. That would leave two options. One is that the original sphere would be replaced by a much larger prosthetic, not the little bit of half-shell plastic which I have always had.

There is, however, a second option, and I want to say up front that my original reaction was that there was no way I was going to tell everyone this. I want my readers to know, however, that I am seriously committed to documenting the ins and outs of the prosthetic/cyborg lifestyle, even when it pains me to do so.

So the second option is that the surgeon takes some of the patient's own tissue and uses it for the orbital transplant. This tissue is typically taken from the patient's buttock. I'm a bit vague about the rest of the details because the surgeon was calling me from between surgeries and didn't have time to say more, but it does give one a lot to ponder.

And in case one craves more medical wizardry and tales of body parts scrambled interchangeably, here's a post about a blind man whose vision was restored using what I refer to as his "eye-tooth."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,529946,00.html

Yes, indeed, I should have some really good material about disability and technology for those Arisia panels I am going to be on. I wonder if I can find someone to turn my old prosthetic eye into a steampunk keychain?

Better than ibuprofen

One of the things I've been doinglately to keep my spirits up --aside from reading lots of horror fiction and munching on Trader Joe goodies-- is listening to WWOZ from New Orleans
http://www.wwoz.com .
It's a blues and jazz radio station, incredibly eclectic, and the DJs don't talk too much except to tell you about the music.

Randall Munroe xkcd volume 0: The Signing!

DAY: Thursday
DATE: December 17, 2009
TIME: 6:00 pm
ROOM: MIT 26-100, access via 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge
MAP: http://whereis.mit.edu/?selection=26

Please join us as Randall Munroe, creator of the wildly popular web-comic
"xkcd," visits MIT to give a mini-talk about his new book and the school
it's funding in Laos. Plus, he'll answer some of your questions. Books will
be available for sale afterward and he'll be doing a signing!

Books are also available now at The MIT Press Bookstore.

Thanks to Breadpig <http://www.breadpig.org>, the Berkman Center at Harvard,
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/>, and the folks behind ROFLCon
<http://roflcon.org> for their help making this event possible.

For more information call (617) 253-5249 or email books@mit.edu.